by Allen Steele
Ignoring him, Joan reached forward to the com panel. She found the frequency selector and turned its knob until she located the band reserved for official government transmissions. Then she activated her mike again and spoke:
“Comet Passenger Oscar One-Nine to SGS Vigilance, do you read?… SGS Vigilance, this is Comet Passenger Oscar One-Nine, Priority Alpha Alpha Alpha, please respond at once…”
VI
As he tumbled through star-flecked darkness, Curt fought to keep from panicking. He was barely able to do so. The same recoil from the plasmar’s discharge that caused him to be thrown clear of the ship had also put him into a headfirst spin. Not enough to make him nauseous or cause him to lose consciousness, but sufficiently disorienting all the same.
He’d heard what Simon said: there was no way the Comet could come back to retrieve him. And aside from what the Brain had told the others, he knew that a rescue attempt would put everyone’s lives in jeopardy. Even if the Brackett’s captain agreed to release the Comet from its berth, by the time his ship reached him, they’d be so far astern that catching up with the beamship would be impossible. Even in death, the saboteur would succeed. The Comet might eventually reach Mars, but its only surviving passengers would be Simon and Grag.
“Never mind me,” Curt found himself saying, even though it had been only a minute or so since he’d last heard from the Comet. “Simon, just … I’m sorry, old man, but just let me go. I can’t let you risk the others’ lives for me.”
A few seconds passed, then Joan’s voice came over the comlink, fainter than it had been before. “Curt, do you hear me? Speak to me if you can.”
“I’m here, Joan. I can hear you.” He suddenly realized that, more than anything else, he wanted to see her again.
“Good. Have you calmed down?”
“Yeah … a little, I guess.” He was calm because he knew that death was imminent and there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t about to tell her that, though. If he was going to die, at least he could die bravely.
“Good. Okay … can you see the ship at all? The Brackett, I mean.”
Curt peered at the stars moving around him, turning his head within his helmet first one way and then another. On his next revolution, he caught sight of a tiny cluster of lights, two of them blinking blue and red, like a miniature constellation as seen through a telescope. That would be the Brackett, already a hundred or more miles away and diminishing rapidly.
“I see it,” he reported. “Too far for me to get to and vice versa.”
“We’re not going to try.” Joan’s signal was getting weaker; he had to strain to hear her. “Okay, listen … switch your com channel to the emergency”—a fuzzy crackle of static—“keep talking, all right? No matter what you do, keep”—more static—“and don’t stop.”
Then he heard Otho’s voice: “Curt, switch on”—crackle—“lights, so—”
A loud rush of static drowned out the rest. “Comet, do you hear me?” Curt demanded, speaking loudly now. “Comet, this is—”
Damn it, he’d almost said “Captain Future”! Curt laughed out loud. Well, why not? “Comet, this is Captain Future. Simon, Otho, Grag … if you can hear me at all … um, thanks, all of you, for giving me a great life, but I guess … well, I think this is pretty much it. Joan, I wish we could have—”
He stopped himself. That was enough. He didn’t want his last words to be embarrassing, even if no one could hear them.
Curt glanced at his helmet’s translucent heads-up display. The air-reserve indicator told him that the lifepack still had a little more than four hours left at his current rate of consumption, but it might as well be four seconds, for all the chances he had of being rescued. There were no other ships nearby; beamships maintained a specific course that kept them within range of the photon railway, and the next one wouldn’t be coming along for quite a while now.
For the first time, he truly realized that space is a very empty and lonely place.
There must have been a reason, though, why Joan told him to keep talking, or for Otho to tell him to turn on his suit lights. It may have been only so that the Comet could determine the direction he was falling, thereby giving another vessel a chance of recovering his body at a later time. But … perhaps there was another ship nearby? One whose course was close enough to the Brackett’s that there was a slim possibility it might be able to locate him. If so …
Curt switched on the suit rescue beacons, two red and blue lights on the back of his lifepack, and activated the emergency transponder that would send out a steady electronic dot-dash-dot on the ku-band. If there was another ship within range, they now had a better chance of spotting him.
The question was, how soon? And would that be soon enough?
Curt pushed that out of his mind. Time to get his tumbling under control. All he had to work with was the plasmar, but it would have to do. He pointed the gun above his head and waited until the bright red dot that was Mars came into view, then fired a one-second burst. It didn’t seem to have much effect, so he tried again the next time he saw Mars, holding down the trigger a little longer. This seemed to retard the spin a little, so he fired again, and again, and again.
It took a dozen or so shots—he lost count after his tenth try—but finally he managed to use the plasmar to brake himself and end the tumble. Curt swore under his breath when it occurred to him that he might have used his gun to get back aboard the Comet while he still had a chance, but then he glanced at the gun’s charge indicator. He’d all but completely drained the batteries just stopping his head-over-heels somersaults; the plasmar was never meant to be a reaction-control device, and it was unlikely he would’ve been able to use it to return to his ship.
Didn’t matter now. He was where he was, and there was nothing he could do about it. At least the view was wonderful. He’d die surrounded by stars.
The thought passed through his mind that he could expedite things a little by adjusting his suit’s atmosphere-control system so that the oxygen-nitrogen feed would gradually be replaced by carbon dioxide. This way, instead of asphyxiation, he’d simply go to sleep, never to wake up again. He discarded that idea as soon as it occurred to him. Suicide wasn’t in his temperament; one way or another, he’d see things through to the last second. He might still be rescued.
So … what to do? Gaze at the stars, of course, and perhaps find a way of passing the time. Unfortunately, the suit wasn’t equipped with any onboard entertainment systems, so he’d have to improvise. But Curt had learned a few space chanteys from Otho over the years, and he had a fairly good memory for their lyrics.
He’d come out of his spin looking straight at Mars. This was all the inspiration he needed. Curt cleared his throat, started in on an old traditional:
“I’m only a lonely spaceman,
With no world to call my own.
I’ve seen all the moons and planets,
But I still just love to roam…”
Curt worked his way through the ballad’s six stanzas, with only an occasional stumble when he couldn’t quite recall all the words. When he was through, an uncomfortable silence descended, save for the muted crackle of static coming through the comlink. So he started another tune, this one from childhood, the theme song of the old Sarge Saturn kidvid show:
“Freezing out by Pluto,
Roasting near the Sun,
Burned by the rains on Titan’s plains,
It’s all a spaceman’s fun…!”
This one took a little more effort to recall. Sarge Saturn had been a favorite when he was growing up under Tycho, one of the things that inspired him to create Captain Future as his fantasy alter ego, but it had been many years since he’d thought about him. In the end, Curt ended up with new lyrics, some of which caused him to laugh uproariously until he realized that he was using up oxygen. Well, so be it. He only had a little more than a couple of hours of air left; two or three minutes expended on a good belly laugh wouldn’t matter all that much. At least it kept him
from going crazy.
Next was a tavern song that had come from Space Guard infantrymen fighting Starry Messenger insurgents in the outer solar system:
“From Mercury to Pluto,
From Saturn back to Mars,
We’ll fight and sail and blaze our trail,
In crimson through the stars…” 1
An odd notion stopped the song in mid-verse. What if Starry Messenger was involved somehow? Many years ago, the militant arm of the now-defunct Outer Worlds Liberation Union had sponsored terrorist attacks on Solar Coalition offices on Mars and the inhabited jovian and kronian moons in an attempt to force the coalition into ceding their colonies to offworld control. After years of Solar Guard police action that often came close to outright interplanetary war, Starry Messenger was crushed and OWLU dissolved, its more radical leaders either dead or in prison.
Yet it was rumored that Starry Messenger cells were still extant on Mars, lying low and waiting for an opportunity to return. How interesting it was that Starry Messenger went into hiding not very long before the Sons of the Two Moons appeared. Sure, the Sons were a religious cult while Starry Messenger were political extremists, but the aresian who’d attempted to kill President Carthew was performing the sort of act that Starry Messenger might have once condoned.
Not only that, but someone obviously didn’t want Curt investigating the assassination attempt. Was the saboteur he’d killed also another agent of Ul Quorn, the so-called Magician of Mars who apparently had ties to both Victor Corvo and the Sons of the Two Moons? If so, did this mean there was a link between Starry Messenger and the Sons?
The more Curt pondered these questions, the more tired he felt. Singing and thinking had calmed him down to the point where he was actually yawning, fighting to stay awake. Well, why bother? He could always take a nap … and if he never woke up, perhaps that was just the way things were meant to be.
Yawning again, he let his eyes close. Arms thrown out from his sides, legs dangling, he allowed himself to relax and let his body drift. Into the depths of space, he fell …
Light flashed against his eyelids, softly at first, then brighter and more urgent. Then, as if in a dream, a voice came to him:
“Comet passenger Captain Future, this is SGS Vigilance launch Romeo Six Eight, do you copy?”
It wasn’t a dream. The voice was really there.
Curt opened his eyes and immediately squinted into the bright glare of a searchlight. Raising a hand to shield his eyes against the beam, he perceived, a couple of hundred feet away, the buglike form of a space vessel’s skiff.
“Captain Future, this is Romeo Six Eight, please respond.”
So the rescue beacon and open comlink channel hadn’t been pointless. There was another ship out here, and it had come looking for him.
“This is Captain Future,” he said, and no longer felt silly about using that name. “Thanks for coming after me.”
A pause, then the voice came back. “You’re welcome, but believe me, this isn’t a free ride. We know someone who wants to talk to you.”
VII
Curt had never expected to ever set foot aboard a Solar Guard patrol ship. Civilians seldom did; when the sleek cruisers weren’t in space, they were in secure hangars where only their crews and others with high-level security clearances were permitted. People generally spotted Guard vessels only from a distance; it was often said that, if you were close enough to see their missile tubes, then you were too close.
So, despite the fact that he’d almost exhausted his air supply—thirty-three minutes, seventeen seconds, according to the final readout on his helmet’s heads-up—Curt watched in fascination as the skiff that retrieved him closed in on the SGS Vigilance. A little more than two hundred feet long, with the red, white, and gold flag of the Solar Coalition painted on its armored hull, the cruiser was a streamlined wedge, its fore and aft launchers ready to take on any adversary.
The most intriguing aspect was its apparent lack of propulsion, save for maneuvering thrusters along its flanks and a magnetoplasma secondary engine at its stern. Instead, ductlike radiation shields on the port and starboard sides contained enormous generators that vaguely resembled the cyclotrons of an earlier era. These were the warp-drive engines. Like other Solar Guard vessels, the Vigilance contained one of the coalition’s most precious secrets: the ability to harness zero-point energy to envelope itself within a bubblelike Alcubierre field that constituted a reactionless drive. When activated, this warp bubble allowed the ship to coast across the surface of spacetime like a stone skipping across the top of a pond.
Because of this, Vigilance and its sister ships were capable of velocities far greater than any other form of propulsion. Exactly how fast was something few people knew; this was classified information. However, it was rumored that a Guard cruiser once reached Sedna, a minor planet in the Kuiper Belt, in only one day, a journey that would have taken a ship with an ordinary fusion drive nearly a year to complete.
The lieutenant j.g. piloting the skiff noticed the look on Curt’s face as the small vessel glided toward the open shuttle bay hatch in the cruiser’s spine. “What’s the matter, kid?” he asked, neglecting the fact that he was only a couple of years older. “Never seen a ship like this before?”
“As a matter of fact, no.” Curt stared through the canopy, absorbing every detail.
“Yeah, well … enjoy it while you can,” drawled the other crewman, the copilot who’d actually pulled Curt aboard. “If the chief isn’t satisfied with the fish we’ve caught, he’s just as liable to toss it right back out.”
The two Guardsmen shared a laugh at his expense. Curt said nothing as he watched the skiff drift to a halt above the open hatch and slowly descend into the shuttle bay. It touched down behind Vigilance’s delta-winged shuttle; as the hatch closed above the skiff, crewmen in hardsuits moved in to attach mooring cables.
“Stand by for field activation in ten secs.” The pilot reached up to snap toggle switches on the ceiling panels, and then glanced back at Curt. “Hold onto your armrests. Five … four … three…”
“Why, what’s—?” Curt barely managed to get the words out of his mouth before he felt the abrupt sensation of falling. Until then, although he was strapped into a passenger seat in the back of the cockpit, he’d been floating about a half-inch above its cushions. Now, all at once, he was actually in his seat, with his hands resting upon the armrests and his feet solidly against the floor.
Gravity.
Another rumor about Guard cruisers was that the same warp bubbles that made the ships capable of reaching velocities approaching light-speed also provided them with artificial gravity. Something to do with the fields isolating the ships from the normal conditions of spacetime, but again, this was classified information that the government was unwilling to divulge. Nonetheless, Curt’s mouth fell open with astonishment, causing the two crewmen to start laughing again.
“Easy there, Captain Future!” the copilot said, not bothering to hide his patronizing tone. “Welcome to the twenty-fourth century!”
Again, Curt decided it was better if he said nothing. He waited while the bay was pressurized, then a ladder was pushed against the skiff’s port side and the hatch was opened. A uniformed Guard officer wearing the peaked cap and chevrons of a sergeant was waiting for him outside. He led Curt to a nearby ready-room and patiently waited while he climbed out of his EVA gear and stowed it in a locker, then escorted him out the door and down a narrow central corridor to a companionway leading up to the main deck.
The sergeant didn’t speak a word to Curt as he took him down another corridor that seemed to run the length of the ship. Here, the Vigilance was less utilitarian than the engineering-level deck below: carpeted deck, faux-wood paneling on the bulkheads, light fixtures molded to look like small fists holding miniature torches. The ship hummed quietly. A couple of times, passing crewmen briefly darted curious looks at Curt as he was marched by, but no one said anything to him until they reached
a door near the end of the corridor. The sergeant rapped on the door and swung it open without waiting for an answer.
“Here he is, Marshal,” he said, and stepped aside to let Curt step into the room.
Ezra Gurney was seated on the other side of a polished oak table that took up most of the room. Somehow, Curt wasn’t surprised to find him here. He knew he should have been, but ever since he and the others left the Moon, he’d had a sneaking suspicion that Gurney would never be too far away.
“Thanks, Sergeant. You may leave now.” As the sergeant closed the door, Ezra rose from his seat and gestured to a leather chair across from him. “Here … sit. You gotta be tired. Hungry, too. Like something to eat?”
“Thanks. Maybe later.” Curt was famished and he felt like he could sleep for a week but tried not to show it. He wasn’t prepared for hospitality from someone who hadn’t trusted him before, and he doubted that Marshal Gurney had lately changed his mind. “I appreciate your coming to the rescue. If you hadn’t—”
“No need to thank me. Savin’ lives is what we do.” Gurney sat down again, and as Curt did the same, he reached for the water pitcher on the platter in the middle of the table. “At least drink something,” he said as he poured ice water into a glass and passed it to Curt. “You can get awfully dried up when you’ve been in a suit for a while.”
The old marshal was right. He was dehydrated. Curt drained the glass in one swallow, reached for the pitcher again. Gurney studied him as he refilled his glass, a half smile on his face. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, son,” he said, “you got some sand in you. I once helped rescue another guy who’d been adrift the way you were, and he was sobbin’ like a baby and huggin’ the guy who hauled him into the airlock … who happened to be me. You spent twice as much time out there than he did, and all you do is have a drink of water. I am truly impressed.”
“Thanks.” Curt wasn’t about to admit that the reason he was so calm was that he’d resigned himself to death. If Gurney wanted to interpret pragmatism as courage, then he wasn’t about to argue with him. “So what brings you here, Marshal? Or did you just happen to be passing through?”